publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/306297
are preserved when they're required for legal matters or investigations, can mitigate the risk of sanctions, fines or even adverse inference decisions by the courts that can lead to damaging lawsuits and decreased shareholder value. • Lower Cost: While most users want to keep all data forever, this practice isn't cost-effective or practical. According to Gartner Research, enterprise data are projected to grow 40 to 60 percent, with unstructured data projected at a growth rate of up to 80 percent, resulting in large volumes of non-valuable data (or duplicate data). A 2012 Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council Summit estimate shows as much as 69 percent of enterprise storage includes files with little value to the business. A better approach is to identify the truly important data to maintain and dispose of the rest in a defensible manner. This alternative approach yields a significantly smaller storage footprint that ultimately translates to lower IT and administration spending and allows you to perform more efficient legal holds and cost-effective e-discovery. Placing stricter controls on enterprise data also allows IT departments greater efficiency in tiering storage or migrating data to the cloud (with hygiene) for better cost containment. • IT Efficiency: In some cases, technology can be bogged down by the active and inactive data it must access. By relocating a portion of inactive data to a repository — such as an archiving system — or using tiered storage and single instancing for documents and records (in a records management system), IT departments can dramatically improve operational efficiency and protect themselves from certain SLA violations. EMERGING DRIVERS OF IG Lower risk, lower cost and efficiency are significant drivers for nearly every information governance project today. However, perhaps in response to recent industry discussions about big data and untapped value within information, two additional drivers have emerged and are now fueling interest in governance practices. • Strategic Insight: More and more, organizations are realizing valuable insights can be attained from enterprise information, and these insights can help deliver top-line revenue growth. By governing data better and thus being able to access this information more effectively, organizations increasingly want to learn more about customer needs, locate internal knowledge centers or identify process inefficiencies by analyzing information at a deeper level. • Increased Productivity: Maximizing the use of information and reducing search and knowledge identification times increase business efficiency. According to recent findings by International Data Corporation, knowledge workers spend an average of about 20 percent of their time searching for information. This drain on productivity can be reduced by better unifying information silos and providing access to more full-featured search capabilities across a broader set of data. ILTA WHITE PAPER: APRIL 2014 WWW.ILTANET.ORG 12 TAKE BACK CONTROL OF ENTERPRISE DATA Identify the truly important data to maintain and dispose of the rest in a defensible manner.